Whats the essential impact of the Internet on politics today?
Most people know that you can connect with people with whom you share an interest via the Internet even if you don’t know them, even on the other side of the world. The Dean campaign, of course, used Meetup.com, which brought Internet capability to the face-to-face world. You can find people who share your interest in a particular candidate, who live in your neighborhood, and want to get together face-to-face. That brings the unique capability of the Internet to connect people with shared interests, together with the ability to perform some kind of action in the face-to-face world. It becomes collective action when that group of people decides they’re going to put some money into a pot and send it to a candidate, or they’re going to do some work for a candidate. So our standard political activities of organizing to support a candidate and organizing to raise money can be done much faster and cheaper. The Dean campaign was able to use e-commerce engines to raise large amounts of money v
